customization [spugbrap’s blog]

September 25th, 2007

Ported my old geek blog’s theme to Wordpress

If you read this blog on the web, you may have noticed that the whole site looks different. I’ve never been too fond of the default Wordpress theme, and didn’t like any of the other Wordpress themes that I’ve seen, enough to use them.

I did always like the theme I had on my old Blogger geek blog, but that theme was not available for Wordpress. The theme is called “Rounders 3″, originally designed by Douglas Bowman.

So, I hacked apart a page from my old geek blog, and did some reading about Wordpress theme development (see links section below), and worked on building a Wordpress theme based my old geek blog’s theme. Today, I decided to go ahead and switch this blog to use that newly-ported theme.

Here are two screenshots, for comparison:

Useful Links:
Theme Development « WordPress Codex
How-To: Create a Wordpress Theme in 5 minutes

Feedback:
What do you think of the new look? Please feel free to leave a reply, below! Also, if you run across any broken links, unreadable fonts, missing images, alignment problems, etc., please let me know. Thanks!

July 18th, 2007

Create your own pedophile bait!

We received an ad in the mail, recently, which immediately disturbed Lacey and I. It’s a service that lets you create real, usable postage stamps with a picture of your choice. Sounds kinda cool, right? But take a look at the ad, and see if you can find what’s wrong with this picture:

It seems like a cool concept, at first, to put whatever picture you want (as long as it’s yours/legal/etc) on stamps. But this ad is proudly showing a picture of a cute little kid, on a stamp. That would be cool if you’re just sending mail to your friends and family, and nobody was going to handle that mail in between.

But the reality is that several people are going to handle each piece of mail, and you’re probably going to send some to billers/rebate warehouses/misc. companies as well, and multiple people will probably handle the mail within those companies. If any of those people happens to like little kids, in a NAMBLA sort of way, then you’ve just given them your cute kid’s home address via the return address on the other corner of the envelope.

In other words, you’re announcing, “Hey, pedophiles! Here’s a picture of my cute kid, and here’s where to come get him/her!”

I remember Lacey talking about some online moms’ group forums where there was some controversy, a while back, when people posted their addresses (for swaps/co-ops/etc) publicly and had cute pics of their kids in their signature blocks. These stamps aren’t quite as bad, I think, because at least their exposure is limited to a few people handling snail mail, whereas the online message boards are googleable.

But, still, stamps.com might want to consider this before enabling proud, naïve parents to advertise their children this way. Art would be fine. Maybe even the family pet. But not children.

July 3rd, 2007

Google Maps adds drag and drop tweaking

Read about this on one of my favorite geek/productivity blogs, lifehacker:

Google Maps: Drag and drop to tweak your driving route
Don’t like the driving route Google Maps doled out to you? Now you can change the driving directions by grabbing the blue route line and dragging it to create a new destination point, which will in turn create a new route.

I’ve been wanting this feature from any online mapping service, for *years*. I’ve talked about it countless times with friends, co-workers, classmates, etc. The ability to say “No, dummy, I’m not taking 66. It’s rush hour!” or “Ack! No way, they’re doing road work on that road this week, and it’s a mess.” is something that I’ve always wished for.

I haven’t tried this feature on Google Maps yet, but I look forward to playing with it sometime in the near future!

August 2nd, 2006

Creative ad campaign for Snakes On A Plane movie

Get a call from Samuel L. Jackson

Who can resist clicking a link like that? This is one of the coolest movie marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. Here’s what the home page says:

Send a free personalized talking “Snakes on a Plane” message in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson to someone you know.
Just give us a few details about the person and tell us whether you want to send your message by phone or by E-mail. Then sit back, relax and enjoy the fright…

Samuel L. Jackson is one of my favorite actors, and my wife is an even bigger fan of his, so I went ahead and entered some info into a series of form inputs, which customized the message for my wife. I’ll probably play around with selecting different options, tomorrow, to see what the funniest combinations are. I haven’t read much about the movie, yet, but I am already compelled to go see it. :)

try it out | digg story

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